Debatable Space (15 page)

In music, too, I trained myself to achieve that instinctive, visceral grasp of musicality which is possessed by ten-year-old
musical prodigies. And what I proved through all this hard work is that what the naturally gifted have as their birthright,
the rest of us can learn
. It just takes time, and practice, and a body that doesn’t decay with age but instead grows sharper, and stronger, and fitter.

I played six hours a day some days. I sang along with my own music, badly at first, then rather well. I learned to count with
my pulse. I learned to immerse myself, surrender myself. And, though my focus was on the classic repertoire, I practised jazz
and blues and boogie-woogie and rock. I learned to be funky, I learned how to swing. And my musical memory became phenomenal;
I knew literally thousands of pieces by heart.

And all the while, for the best part of forty years, I applied myself religiously to the task of general self-improvement.
I embarked on a year-long Grand Tour of the entire world. I spent two years in Florence, a year in South America. I studied
art and architecture, local customs, I made friends, I took lovers. I became fluent in seven languages.

During these years, I often spent two hours a day in the gym, but religiously observed a schedule of rest days to prevent
overtraining. I had my knees replaced. I had my hip replaced. I had a hysterectomy to remove a fast-growing cancer, and had
my womb replaced with a bioplastic alternative. I pioneered skin-replacement implants, and shed my entire skin like a snake
and lived for three months in intensive care looking like a cadaver. But the skin grew back, as youthful as a twenty-year-old’s.

I had the most joyful time imaginable. And yet, for all this, despite experiencing statistically more moments of pleasure
than any other person so far in the history of humanity, there were times when I became bored. And, indeed, on the brink of
clinical depression.

Why? Because I was lonely, I suppose. And envious. Every time I met a young man or young woman I yearned to have what they
took for granted; sheer, naive ignorance of the nasty, spiteful awfulness of life. I yearned to be natural, unselfconscious,
at peace with the world and myself. And I was convinced, too, that other people found me boring. Even though I was, by now,
beautiful and gifted, I still looked at myself in the mirror and saw that strange shadowy creature: “It’s Only Me”.

It’s

Only

Me.

How could this be! Why wasn’t I happy?

I was haunted by a fear of death and, absurdly, its aftermath. My fear was: when I do, eventually, die, how will I be remembered?
And how soon would I be forgotten? I hugged to myself the idea that those closest to me would never get over my death, and
would live barren empty lives from that point on. But I knew, in reality, that my passing would be greeted with a wave of
relief, even from those who loved me. Thank heavens
she’s
dead, my friends would all think, and I’m still alive.

So I resolved not to die. Just to spite those fuckers. I continued to keep fit, and I continued my rejuvenation treatments.
I wasn’t, of course, the only person to be embarking on a systematic course of anti-ageing therapy. All over the world, people
were getting older, and looking younger. The film star Sheryl Martinez was, at seventy-four, relaunching her career as a singer.
Over several decades, her reedy voice had, with the help of surgery, evolved into a sexy husky growl, which she had modified
with extensive training into one of the all-time-great soul voices. And she was
hot
, the poster girl for the over-seventies rejuves.

And…

I play the first chord. The music ripples through the hall. Joy suffuses my being as the piano reveals its soul and I play,
and I play, and I play, and . . .

And then there was the Billionaires’ Club – a group of 490 men and women who had devoted themselves to anti-ageing with all
the resources at their disposal. These middle-aged obsessives had become playboys and playgirls, with perfect physiques, whose
sex lives were the subject of relentless tabloid gossip, and . . .

All too soon, the first piece, a playful scherzo, comes to an end. The hall explodes with applause. I bask in it for a moment.
Then my hands hover over the keys again, and . . .

And there was Andrei Makov.

Andrei was a triple Gold Medal winner at the 2032 Olympics in Seoul. He was nineteen years old, and he broke the world record
in three separate events – the 400 metres, the 800 metres and the triathlon. Andrei’s achievement was formidable, the result
of ten years of intensive training. With his tall, gangly frame and his intense Russian stare, he became an international
teen idol, as well as going down in sporting history as one of the all-time greats.

Andrei’s most remarkable achievement was to challenge the African domination of running events, which over the years had seen
the African runners seize medal after medal after medal. These athletes, mainly from Kenya, were gifted with bodies that defied
all previous standards of human performance.

Then along came Andrei… who left the poor Kenyan runners literally gasping in his wake. Andrei’s approach was inner-focused,
based on an explicitly Zen training method that liberated
chi
while also scientifically analysing and improving length of stride, oxygen intake, and all the other controllable aspects
of the human performance.

And when he ran, he seemed more than human.

In 2044, Makov won five more Olympic gold medals – for the 400 metres, the triathlon, the pentathlon, freestyle swimming,
and weightlifting. Never before has a single athlete dominated such a vast range of events. Makov was bulkier now, but still
had that lean and dangerous look. His physical strength came not from a ripped physique, but from relaxed muscle fibres of
vast tensile strength. Makov had studied pilates, he was a black belt seventh dan in
goju ryu
karate, and he was also a keen undersea diver. His versatility was matched only by his sang froid. Everything he did, he
did effortlessly. At the age of thirty-five he took up tennis for the first time. At the age of thirty-six, he won the tennis
Grand Slam, defeating the number 1, 2 and 3 seeds in humiliating straight sets. At the age of thirty-nine, he won the Tour
de France and, at his own insistence, was drug-tested before and after and shown to be totally clean.

But at the age of forty, Andrei developed a brain tumour. Over the space of three excruciating years, he dipped in and out
of madness, as he intensively studied the nature of his disease and the possible remedies. Andrei refused to take chemotherapy
and radiotherapy, because he felt they interfered with his perception of his own
chi
. Instead he used complementary medicine to control the growth of the tumour. And Andrei then volunteered himself as a guinea
pig for a radical new therapy which used a viral agent to mutate the tumour. The tumour would not be excised from his brain;
it would be transformed, it would become
part
of his brain.

The technique was successful; the tumour went into recession, and became a benign “spare brain” which, as an unexpected side-effect,
activated the rejuvenation mechanisms in Andrei’s body. And so, without any radiation treatment or injections or gene therapy,
Andrei’s body began its journey to eternal youth. The viral agent had the further effect of clarifying and cleaning the neural
pathways, almost like a defragmenting and disk-cleaning program. After the treatment, Andrei’s memory was crystal-sharp, and
his ability to manipulate numbers mentally was astounding.

His judgement, however, was all too fallible. Andrei retired from athletics and went into business. He lost millions in the
course of fifteen years, after being cheated by a series of sophisticated advisers, all of them advocating arcane mathematical
approaches to investing. He fell in love with a glamorous actress, who cuckolded him and then did a kiss and tell. He fell
in love with an attractive nuclear scientist, who drove him to the brink of violence with her paranoid jealousies. And he
fell in love with two sisters, who wrote a book about him mocking his every word and deed. And, finally, a tabloid spy succeeded
in filming him having sex with two hookers in St Petersburg, one of whom was only fifteen; and the resulting scandal shattered
his reputation in his home country.

Andrei became addicted to alcohol, heroin, cocaine and chocolate. His body weight ballooned. He became a parody figure.

But at the age of fifty, Andrei went into training again, determined to halt the decline. He attempted to win a place at the
forthcoming Olympics, but failed to make the grade in any of the qualifying events. Andrei was still a strong, fit man. But
he was no longer the fastest sprinter in the world, or the best swimmer, or the strongest weightlifter. He was, of course,
over the hill. His friends advised him to try the marathon, traditionally the event in which older athletes can still credibly
compete.

And so Andrei spent five years training for the marathon; and then he ran five marathons in five days, following in the footsteps
of the ageing heart-diseased Ranulph Fiennes, who achieved a similar feat in the late twentieth century. The difference is
that Fiennes’s triumph was to actually complete all his events, at painstakingly slow speed. But Andrei ran and
won
all five marathons, at a terrifying pace. And, after breaking the world marathon records five times in a row, he finished
each race with a sprint of legendary and astonishing swiftness.

On the basis of this triumph, though now in his mid-fifties, Andrei won a chance to compete in the Olympics again, despite
attempts to have him banned on the grounds that his spontaneous rejuvenation contravened the rules about drug-taking for athletes.
At the 2064 Olympics he set a new world record for the 400 metre sprint. He outclassed runners who were decades younger than
him.

And in so doing, he challenged once and for all the dominant Western myth: the myth of decline. In Eastern culture, the prevailing
myth was the opposite; it was of the aged sensei who was faster, stronger and more skilful than his younger acolytes. But
we in the West have always swallowed the dream of gilded youth; and consequently, we made a world fit for the young to squander.

Andrei’s triumph broke all those rules, and shattered for ever the old paradigms. Suddenly, age became a state to which people
should aspire, rather than a fate to be dreaded. Andrei was a hero who changed the world.

And then one night he went to see a pianist play at Carnegie Hall…

. . . and here I am again, on stage, playing the piano in front of my adoring public.

My next piece was a zest-filled Brahms waltz, which went well. Then I segued into a delightful jazz improvisation based on
a Dizzy Gillespie riff. My heart sang with joy; I felt superhuman.

But slowly, my ease and fluency deserted me. I froze with fear at the beginning of the first movement of the Beethoven Piano
Concerto. At one point, I stopped entirely. The audience was hushed. Sweat beaded my brow and a tiny drop fell and splashed
a piano key.

Then I continued, and the audience sighed, and were with me. If I’d planned it, I couldn’t have managed more adroitly. I’d
won their hearts! I’d played the underdog card!

But my exultation slowly faded. As the evening continued, I felt the shuffle of feet, the exaggerated coughs, as sympathy
ebbed away at the sheer… awful… fucking…
mediocrity
of my piano playing. I’d got away with so much with my flashy, entertaining introductory pieces. But now that I was playing
the Beethoven, it became evident that my legato was stiff, my articulation uneven, and my crescendi and diminuendi too consciously
“worked at”. I had flash, and flair, but I was slowly and cruelly revealed as a pub pianist with aspirations.

Naturally, after the event, I blamed the orchestra. The piano. My nerves. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that for all my
ability and mastered technique, I didn’t
care
enough – about the music, about the audience, about what my fingers were doing. So there is, after all, a mystery X element
– commitment, soul, passion – call it what you will. After decades of practice, I could play the piano; the piano would never
play me.

But enough self-laceration. The point is: it doesn’t matter that I gave a mediocre piano recital at the Carnegie Hall.
It matters that I did it at all
. I had mocked the capricious God who endows some with great talents for music or sport, and endows others like me with fuck-all.
So I laughed off the bad reviews, the book sales went through the roof, and I was the success of the season.

And so after the first flush of embarrassment, I felt triumphant, and vindicated.

And of course, I also that night met Andrei, who I had idolised from afar for many years. There was nearly a ten-year age
gap between us – I was eighty-one, he was seventy-three. But he looked, frankly, older than me. He had a blaze of silver hair
which he proudly refused to darken. There were deep laughter lines around his eyes, and his skin was thick and weathered.
But these outward signs of ageing merely enhanced his extraordinary air of energy and fitness. He walked like proud air, his
movements were effortless. And he saw everything. Without visibly flicking his eyes, he could see every person in a crowded
room and remember their appearance and the colours they were wearing and have some notion of what relationship there was between
people standing near each other – friend, lover, relative, business acquaintance, whatever it might be.

I, by contrast, was still pretty clumsy. I used to break things a lot. And I was amazingly unobservant. I could be standing
next to someone at a party for ten minutes or more and not be aware they were there.

And even now, though my memory for detail is astonishingly acute, I am still capable of forgetting fundamental facts. For
instance, I had a sister who died in her mid-forties. Recently I found a photograph of her and couldn’t remember who it was.
(Luckily, I’d written her name and family relationship on the back.) It’s not bad memory per se; it’s just, well, to be honest,
I never really liked her much. And I rarely noticed what she was doing, or saying. So my memory bank deprioritised her into
oblivion.